The 2005 E-MELD (Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data) workshop on digital language documentation, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, will focus on linguistic ontologies and data categories as aids in linguistic annotation and as tools for the fine-grained search and retrieval of language documentation.

One goal of the workshop is to invite community participation in the development of GOLD, the General Ontology for Linguistic Description developed by the E-MELD team at U. of Arizona. However we welcome presentations on all aspects of morphosyntactic annotation and/or the use of ontologies in linguistic description. For more information about GOLD, see:
the GOLD project page or the E-MELD ontology page.

The E-MELD (Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data) Project is a five-year project funded by the National Science Foundation with a dual objective: to aid in the preservation of endangered languages data and documentation and to aid in the development of the infrastructure necessary for effective collaboration among electronic archives. As part of the effort to promote consensus on best practices in digital language documentation, E-MELD is hosting its 2005 workshop from July 1-3 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The workshop will consist of invited papers, general sessions and working group sessions in which the workshop participants will provide input on best practices in digital language documentation and advise on the expansion of the School of Best Practice and the GOLD ontology for linguistic annotation. We particularly welcome the participation of field linguists in the workshop.